Wonder Woman 1984

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on January 29, 2021 and ABC Central Victoria on February 1.

(M) ★★

Director: Patty Jenkins.

Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Lilly Aspell, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, Kristoffer Polaha, Amr Waked.

"Don't tell anyone, but I'm stealing this man."

Wonder Woman is far and away the best film of the DCEU. After the varying levels of disappointment that were Man Of Steel, Batman Vs Superman, and Suicide Squad, Gal Gadot rocked up in her Amazonian armour and kicked butt, literally and cinematically.

All that only makes this haphazard sequel all the more disheartening. After getting so much right first time around, WW84 has moments of good spectacle but fails to nail the heart or solid storytelling of the original. It labours its well-meaning themes, litters its trail with plot-holes and poor writing, and wastes its opportunities and cast.

Moving on from the WWI setting of the first film, the sequel finds Diana Prince (Gadot) in Washington DC circa 1984, where she works at the Smithsonian. Although trying to keep a low profile, she occasionally dons her Wonder Woman costume to not-so-quietly catch crooks and save the day.

These dual jobs bring her into contact with a magical MacGuffin with the ability to grant wishes. Soon shifty conman Maxwell Lord (Pascal) is on the scene, keen to use the "Dreamstone" to build his business empire and maybe take over the world in the process.

Wonder Woman 1984 has some fun with its '80s setting, invoking the films of the era in an opening shopping mall jewel heist, and throwing seemingly endless digs at the fashions of the time. The decade also plays into one of the themes - that greed, for lack of a better word, is bad.

But this is just one of the many themes threaded together to form an ugly, tattered theme-quilt that doesn't hold together. On top of "greed is bad" comes "love is good", "truth is good", "you have to earn stuff" and "be careful what you wish for" - all reasonable ideas, all dealt with poorly here. They come off as disappointing clichés either fitfully explored or painfully laboured.

Equally frustrating is the script's rule-bending and a bizarre willingness to seemingly make stuff up on the fly. Case in point: if you have a device that grants only one wish to everyone, then you can't change it to grant someone two wishes two-thirds of the way through. Similarly, if you have a character with lots of powers, including the ability to turn things invisible, you probably want to set that up, rather than just drop it into one pointless (but pretty) scene and then never use it again.

All this is a shame because Gadot is magnetic yet again in the lead role, perfectly balancing godliness and humanity, brains and brawn. She heads a superb cast, which only makes it all the more disappointing. Wiig is great at showcasing Barbara Ann Minerva's transformation, even if we do get a horribly fake scene where Wonder Woman tells us how funny and charming Barbara is, rather than the film just showing us how funny and charming Barbara is. 

Pascal is also excellent as Lord, one of DC Comics' many cool villains. He gives Lord a level of desperation that underscores his greed, and goes enjoyably over-the-top in places, even if his denouement feels forced.

There is some great spectacle here, although sometimes at the expense of the film's own sense of reason. The characters and cast are cool, but again they're not enough to drown out the bad writing. After such a stirring debut, it's pains me to say that Wonder Woman 1984 isn't that wonderful.